Baby Goat – de Leche

Exodus 20:22-Exodus 23:19

Intro

Anna and I went to IKEA together a couple weeks ago. We attempted to drop off the kids at their magical child care center. I notice, in line, that there is a sign with two lines on it. Your child must be between these two lines to enter.

Logan is just, maybe an inch too tall, just eyeballing it. But we are going to try.

The parents behind me in line, I hear the wife say to the husband, “that one is too tall for this!” And I want to turn around and say “don’t you ruin this for me! SSSSSHHHSHS!”

Maybe he’ll sneak by, maybe the inch doesn’t matter, maybe we can still go through IKEA in peace!

Not a chance. Yes, they are providing a service, but number one priority is not getting sued in by stepping out of bounds.

And it was just the worst! (Actually, Logan was a great sport walking through every square inch of IKEA).

Another story. Arabelle came to Group one80 with two friends, both a year older, two months ago. Now according to our “cutoff”, to our rule, Arabelle was set to go with the younger crowd, her friends to the older group. Alice, Grandma, sees the problem and pulls me aside. She identifies the problem based on our default rules, what could we do about this? Let’s solve this together.

Why is the rule there? To make the teaching and games age appropriate. Could Arabelle hang, would she be a distraction to the older kids? Let’s try it, keeping in mind we can change back if we feel it is distracting or hurting the class at all.

In other words, I don’t have a problem, we have a problem. Let’s talk through options together, because ultimately what we are trying to do here is not enforce a bunch of rules… but do something great, “good works” in the lives of these kids.

Which kind of place are we as a church?

Are we a place that is about doing amazing things together? Spurring one another on to great works? Encouraging one another in that? Walking and working through challenges and problems together?

Or are we a place that has a sign at the front door that says “you must be this high to enter?”

I know we want to be the first and that the second is ridiculous.

But people walking in the door are going to assume that we are the second… because that has been the actual character and culture of the Church through all too much of history. And, this is harder, do we have habits of interactions, phrases, little Christian-ese defaults, that all together, subtly, put us in that category?

Did you feel that you had it “have it together” before you walked in the door this morning?

Let those questions sit at the back of your mind as we turn to our next section of Exodus.

A Whole Heap of Laws, Exodus 20:22-23:19

The Ten Commandments have been delivered, the people panicked at the voice of God and the picture of Righteousness, they sent Moses forward and they withdrew.

What follows is several chapters of detailed instructions that God gives to Moses. This is referred to as the Covenant Code and they include a very broad spectrum of laws… but not all of the laws that God is going to give to the Hebrew people. Later, there is a 40-day long note-taking session that Moses has with God. But here, God gives what are seen as prototype laws. They cover much of Civil life, in a representative sort of way. They cover some of Religious or Ceremonial life… in a representative sort of way. They cover much of Moral life, again, in a representative sort of way.

It is, perhaps, like the preview to a movie, a taste of the whole Law to follow.

Laws about Altars (Ceremonial). Don’t use steps to the altar… I don’t want to see up your robe!

Laws about Slaves (Civil). There was one word for slave / indentured servant / employee, but these laws push the boundaries of that practice by establishing some rights for the slave / employee. That said, these strike us as bizarrely backwards.

How to punish an Ox… or the owner of an ox if it hurts somebody. Was it known to be dangerous?

Cherry-picking a few punishments to a few laws. If someone injures an animal, seduces a virgin. The death penalty for sorcery, bestiality and idolatry.

Exodus 22:29 “Don’t be stingy as your wine vats fill up.”

A real hodge-podge of laws, especially here at the end of 22 and 23, it is like those flashing moments at the end of the movie preview, where you are seeing like a quarter second of parts of fight scenes and just barely making out characters and actors and explosions…. And then it ends with this.

Exodus 23:19

19 “Bring the best of the firstfruits of your soil to the house of the Lord your God.

“Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk.”

First, the bad news. We are not going to preach through every law. Aww… Probably each one reveals something about the will of God, the purpose of God reforming his people, shaping his people in a certain direction, challenging their culture towards love, and preserving His people against the surrounding idolatrous cultures. One by one, we could walk through and peel back each law and ponder. This would be a great scholarly activity… not so much a preaching activity.

Instead, we are going to speak quickly about the purpose and type of these laws, their ultimate effect on the people of God, and finally, what we do about them. And we will do this by focusing in on the most important of the laws which comes right at the end.

The Purpose of the Law – Time, Place and Audience

The purpose of the law is what I just said, to detail the course of righteousness to a particular people with a starting place and culture and push them back towards righteousness in Civil life, Religious or Ceremonial Life and Moral life.

The people start off as this Egyptian sub-culture with roots way back with nomadic tribal leaders Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And God is going to make them a nation, a priesthood, who are His people. These laws are like a crash course, a rehabilitation of the people, maybe like turn by turn directions towards the path of righteousness.

This makes them very hard for us to go through, because we often do not understand the original context and purpose of the law… and what happens if you start applying turn by turn directions in reverse?

You go backwards. What happens if we applied the laws applying to servant/employee/slave relations now? We would go backwards, removing freedom and rights and opportunity.

The Law – Civil, Ceremonial and Moral

To help us navigate these laws theologians have used three helpful categories: civil, ceremonial and moral laws. These are observed categories, the laws don’t say “I am a Civil law and am only applicable to Israel as a legal entity.” “I am a Ceremonial law and I apply to Temple worship and sacrifice.” “I am a moral law and I describe innate realities about humanity and God’s character and thus describe Righteousness for all time.”

That would be helpful, little inspired signs. This is why we love the 10 commandments so much. They are so clearly set apart, spoken by God’s own voice to all the people, written in stone by his finger, affirmed and practiced by Jesus and the early church, we have no confusion about calling those permanent Moral laws.

And then we muddle our way through the rest.

For example

You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk…

Is this Civil?

It is a farming practice, might be regulated by the FDA, is it unsafe for people to consume Goat de leche? Could be.

Is this a Ceremonial law? Scholars got very excited at one Archeological find, it was a Ugaritic tablet and it was missing letters and hard to translate but some put in some guesses and thought they had a record of a Canaanite ritual practice of sympathetic magic where boiling a kid in its mother’s milk would impart strength and fertility to the flock. This could be a worship issue. More recent scholars say… probably not, doesn’t really fit.

Or, my favorite, Philo, a historian contemporary of Jesus, says: “it is grossly improper that the substance which fed the animal should be used to season or flavor it afterwards.” It’s just gross. There’s a moral issue here, animals deserve some level of respect, and goat de leche just goes too far.

A “Gotcha” Culture

So this whole heap of laws, mixed up in Civil and Ceremonial and Moral… and what do we do with all this? What did the people of Israel do?

They entered the cycle of ignoring the laws, being punished for the laws, feeling guilty, repenting, trying hard, repeat. And repeat. We talked about this cycle of guilt and sin and shame last week.

For centuries they cycled. Prophets would try to call them back, Kings would lead them back, this endless cycle, and I get the feeling, some were saying, “This isn’t working!”

And of course, God knows, “this isn’t working”.

And in the midst of telling, through Jeremiah, that they are going to be punished again, exiled out of the Promised Land, the latest cycle of sin, then guilt, then punishment… God says this.

Jeremiah 31:33

33 “This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel

after that time,” declares the Lord.

“I will put my law in their minds

and write it on their hearts.

I will be their God,

and they will be my people.

And they looked forward to that day.

In The Meantime

While they waited the cycle continued. And continued. And “when the time was right” the people of God, the Jewish people at this point, were maybe the best and the closest at getting this whole “law” thing right as they ever were.

They were great at the law thing, in fact, they had a whole class of people that were religious lawyers.

The Pharisees. These guys get a bad rap, but they were the ultimate, I think, expression of the law. If the whole point of this is to get the law as absolutely right as we can, apply each little detail perfectly, lets surround each law with a fence, a 100 other laws to protect us from breaking one of the original 613 commandments.

They take one like “do not boil a young goat in his mother’s milk.”

Let’s not get close to that, let’s just keep dairy and meat completely separate. Like they can never touch. Then we can be sure. Does that sound familiar? That is a huge component of Kosher laws, a protection against breaking this somewhat mysterious, seemingly random commandment in the Covenant Code.

They then took this and seemed to strive to catch one another out in unrighteousness. This is a “gotcha!” community. They constantly did this with Jesus, trying to catch him out. Gotcha, you ate with sinners. Gotcha, this woman committed adultery.

Jesus says, you want laws? I wrote the laws. I am the laws.

You want truth, I am the truth! You can’t catch me out, the law is written on my heart… in fact the law flows out of myself, my character!

Jesus rejects the “gotcha” community. Jesus rebukes the lawyers.

And because of Jesus, we don’t have to be lawyers. Jesus opens up a new door, one that has no “you must be this tall to enter” sign.

Hebrews 10:15-25

15 The Holy Spirit also testifies to us about this. First he says:

16 “This is the covenant I will make with them

after that time, says the Lord.

I will put my laws in their hearts,

and I will write them on their minds.”

Straight quote of our Jeremiah passage, and the author of Hebrews is calling it. Fulfilled. This has been fulfilled. The Holy Spirit has written, is writing God’s laws on our hearts and minds. This is an ongoing process maybe, or maybe an accomplished act that we are discovering gradually, living out one step at a time, but this is in us!

17 Then he adds:

“Their sins and lawless acts

I will remember no more.”

18 And where these have been forgiven, sacrifice for sin is no longer necessary.

So this is a radical paradigm shift. The old has gone, the new is come.

And there is a vagueness, a mystery to this “law on our hearts and minds” business. Maybe I have trouble reading my own heart and mind. I have trouble sometimes discerning that law on my heart and mind. And God is working it out in me, turning my attention to aspects of my life, convicting me of this sin or that, calling me to improve my character and relationships…

And He is doing that in you too.

And the whole thing is a messy confusing business. And I kind of long for an easy sign that says “you must be this tall” but instead we have a Living God who is transforming all of us in variously messy and painful ways. Sometimes this writing hurts, or it’s the exposing of the rest of myself to His Spirit that hurts.

But if God is writing, has written, His law on your heart… I don’t also have to write my law on your heart.

I can trust to God’s writing on you. That He is doing a work in you.

So how do we become a community of people who leave condemnation at the door, he burn the “you must be this tall” sign, who refuse to “gotcha” one another as we don’t measure up to the law… how do we then live with one another? God is writing on your heart, and he is writing on my heart, and we know where we are headed, we have a picture of Righteousness, and it hasn’t changed because it is in His character, but what He is focusing on in you is different than where I am at…

How do we then do this together?

I don’t have the answer, I have an idea, but better yet, here in Hebrews, we have a beautiful picture:

19 Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, 20 by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, 21 and since we have a great priest over the house of God,

22 let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. 23 Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. 24 And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, 25 not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

Let us draw near

With a sincere heart

Assurance of faith, clean from guilt, washed, holding to hope

And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds

Not giving up meeting together

But encouraging one another

A Habit of Here

Now this is a beautiful picture. What does it mean? We could spend some time here just soaking in these phrases.

It at least means that we are “here for you.” It isn’t a “gotcha” community, it is a “here for you” kind of place. That is what we want to be. We don’t want to be lawyers. We want to be LOVERS! That’s weird, I get it, but we want to LOVE one another.

God is writing on your heart… I am here for you. Here to help you read what God is doing, here to draw near together, here to encourage, here to spur you on, here to help you hold on to hope… here for you and with you.

What are the habits and ways of speaking that are getting in the way of that?

There is a way to say “I’ll pray for you” that really means “Shut up and go away.” I know that one. There is a tendency to put our finger on sin, calling it sin, and often people say “I know… that’s my wound, thanks for poking it!”

There is a way to communicate, “I am here for you.” I don’t have answers, but I am with you in this. Or I have some ideas, but I’m going to wait until you are ready.

Some people in our church are so good at this, and we know it because they are the people I would go to when I need to talk… knowing they can just listen. The ears of the Body, the spiritual gift of listening and mercy.

We don’t have all have that. But there is no spiritual gift of “shut up and go away.” And whether we dress it up with Christian language, we can speak and act in such a way that that is all a hurting person hears. And they either dress it up to fake it through church, or they see the sign that says “you must be this tall, and this together, and this righteous to enter.”

How do we become a “here for you” kind of people. Who “consider how to spur one another on… to encourage one another.”

I don’t have all the answers, I’m not sure I am particularly good at this. In fact, I know that I am capable of communicating “You must be this high to enter.”

I’m going to try this, you tell me how it goes. This is just my idea of how to apply the vision we see here in Hebrews, you’ll have better ideas and I want to hear them.

But when someone opens up to me, when I see someone is hurting, when someone shares a need with me or a prayer request or any of those things…

And my every instinct is going to be to go straight for “the solution” or “I’ll pray for you…” because I can pray for them and that’ll help…

But before any of that, they need to know, somehow, that I care, that I love them, that I am with them. So I can say “That sucks… I am here for you.”

And then hold my breath. And hold back all the other things, the truisms, the Christian phrases, the easy churchy things I could say. Hold them all back, and consider, consider how I can spur them on or encourage them.

Or just participate with the way God is writing his law on their heart. Let’s be the kind of church that hunts out “you must be this tall” signs and destroys them. Let’s be a “here for you” kind of people.

We have to do the “draw near together before the throne of God” part. Hold on to hope, together. Bringing our sincere hearts. That is why we don’t give up meeting together. It is only in that Spirit that we can truly spur one another on to great things.

Then we can all go out and enjoy some Goat de Leche together.